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Friday, September 27, 2013

"There Is Something In English Bites! For You To Chew, Relish, and Cherish"

Manish Gupta is a banking professional. When not crunching numbers he is busy engaging with and examining the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the English language. He also likes trivia, travelling, adventure sports, delving into human psychology, and giving professorial discourses to colleagues, family and friends, and practically anyone who can give him a patient hearing. An engineering graduate from Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh and an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur, he lives in Mumbai with his wife Deepali, a medical professional, and daughters Tamanna and Prakriti.

I never knew that one can improve his/her vocabulary and word
power in English until I came across 'English Bites!' Today, I am in conversation
with Manish Gupta, the author of this brilliant book.

Congratulations Manish on the success of English Bites! It was a
pleasure reading it and I, along with the readers, would like to know more
about you.

Amrit, I thank
you for reading and reviewing my book on your blog. I am glad that you liked it
and found it useful in further fueling your love for the English language.

How did you come up with this unique concept of increasing
word power in such a fun and easy going manner?

To answer this
question, we need to get a little bit into my background. I grew up in Rohtak,
a small and sleepy town in Haryana in the 1970s and 80s. The only English I
spoke was in school and that too to respond to questions of my teachers in the
class. I looked down at English as an alien tongue merely suited to the narrow
field of academia and with no particular use once someone got into the real
economy.

As a result, I
was horrible in all aspects of communication. My active vocabulary was
extremely limited, pronunciations & spellings were terrible (as I refused
to accept English as a non-phonetic language that it largely is), sentence
construction was poor, and my fluency was severely compromised.

The thought of improving my English started in
Class XI after facing acute embarrassment in front of my third and final crush
(and her family) when I could not speak even one correct sentence of English
with a foreigner we met during a family vacation (and she did).

This thought took a serious turn once I landed-up at Punjab
Engineering College in Chandigarh and came face-to-face with far more fluent
and erudite specimens from convent schools from metros and towns much bigger
than my hometown. I also noticed how I used to get tongue-tied while attempting
to make a small conversation in English with or even in front of the convent
educated colleagues and that hurt…really badly.

This thought was further strengthened when I
realised to my horror that English had long outgrown the narrow confines of
academia and become extremely
relevant and in fact an absolute necessity in the real economy. So much so,
that I would need to face group discussions and interviews where my
proficiency in this language will be put to the real test to get into one of
the best engineering jobs offered on campus.

Having lived all
my school life in disdain for this alien tongue, the grossly neglected subject
of English made me realize its importance, its vastness, its complexity, and my
far less than self proclaimed ‘photographic memory’ all at once. I needed
something quick and in large doses to beat the convent educated types in their
own game and seal the best job offered in the campus in my name and after
gaining some industry experience, successfully compete with them once again for
admission into a top-tier MBA program.

Let me confess
here that I had drifted towards an MBA after realizing that no specialist (read
post-graduate) medico girl will consent to marry a Bachelor of Engineering in
an arranged marriage situation I had found myself in after many crushed
crushes. Marrying a medico was a childhood dream; the flexibility of working
hours that profession allows (a must for raising a happy family) is only a
later realization.

Hence, I set
aside the word lists, my failed attempts at mugging, and started creating
interesting stories and anecdotes to make indelible imprints of this foreign
language in my mind. This was the genesis of the book. It took a lot of
research and creativity, but it was a matter of survivability. It was the only
thing that could have rescued me from definite depression and elevated me to
think and speak like an erudite gentleman.

Once I started revising the book in 2008, I
had two dominant thoughts in my mind. The first thought was that this is an
opportunity to spread a culture of making teaching (not necessarily limited to
language learning) less bookish and pedantic and making LEARNING more FUN. The
second and equally, if not more, powerful thought was to put in my bit to make
sure that language does not become a handicap for anyone to realize their
ambitions and dreams!

How was the entire process, right from the inception till the
point the book got published?

You may find it
hard to believe but this manuscript was in the making for over 20 years and
this has influenced a lot of content in the book. It started as an idea in my
second year of engineering way back in 1989-1990 when two of my closet friends
and I resolved to publish a book each before we turned 21. This, we agreed, had
several advantages.

§Till Class XII, I stayed in the
campus of a girls’ college with our row house facing the girls’ hostel and had
left this beautiful environment to join Mechanical Engineering at Punjab
Engineering College, Chandigarh (a subject no girl dared to join in our year
and many years before and after). While this led to a deep appreciation and
understanding of how God re-balances our lives, it also made our resolve to
attract attention from the few girls from other depts., amid very strong
competition, even harder. What better way to attract attention than project our
multi-faceted personalities, mastery over the English language (we had declared
we were writing books in English medium), and great sense of humour (my book
was supposed to be a FUN book).

§ Make us look
precocious in the eyes of potential employers after Engineering, interviewers
during the MBA admission process, and potential parents and other family
members of the post-graduate medico girl I was destined to marry in an arranged
marriage situation that I had
found myself in after many crushed crushes.

§Give us an additional source of
annuity income plus a decent advance, with which to fund the MBA education.
Annuity income stream was reserved for annual vacations in exotic foreign
locales.

I thought I had
written a masterpiece by the time our final placements ended (spoiling my
grades in the process) and was still a few months shy of turning 21. My other
friends, who were writing on ‘quizzing’ and ‘poetry’, had pulled out of this
pledge while they were still in their teens.

My manuscript
then hibernated for 20 years as I got busy with my first job at Tata Motors, an
MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur, my banking career at a major multinational bank, and
family life. The manuscript was preserved on a 3.5 inch diskette in Microsoft
Word 2000 that refused to open on my old PC, when I thought of reviving my work
of art in the year 2008.

Fortunately, the
handwritten version (‘manuscript’ in the real sense of the word) had survived
well on loose sheets of paper, which I promptly transferred on my PC and
started editing and expanding it at the same time. By the time I finished in 4 years
(working on weekends), I had landed up re-writing the entire book.

When it came to
publishing, I realized that there has been an explosion of books in the Indian
market in the past 3-4 years. Thus, a freshly minted author had little or no
chance to get his manuscript a fair evaluation with the top publication house,
unless the manuscript was, in their assessment, a masterpiece and/or immensely
suitable as a script of a block-buster movie. I did send it to a few
publication houses directly and their lack of responses despite passionate
follow-ups told me it didn't fit either of these two categories.

Fearing I will
exhaust all the top names though this route, I sought the expert intervention
of a literary agent. He critically assessed the quality and marketability of
the manuscript before submitting it to the select set of publishers that are
interested in publishing this genre of books. It took less than 4 months after
submission of the manuscript to the literary agent for me to sign a publishing
contract with Penguin Books India.

Thereafter, life
became hectic as I had to incorporate the extremely valid suggestions of my
commissioning editor Shahnaz Siganporia, who made me connect my disparate
chapters on different subjects into a single story that started from page 1 and
ended at page 334. Then the copy editors Mudita Mubayi-Chauhan and
Paromita Mohanchandra took over and made me relearn the rules of grammar and
punctuation. Finally, after 9 months of hard labor, the book came to life.

What do you feel lacks in our current education system? If
you had the power, what changes would you like to see that would lead to a
smoother and well planned system?

In India, 4% of
children never go to school, 42% drop out before they finish primary school,
and 90% drop out before entering college. In government schools, as per one
study, 25% of the teachers are absent on any given day. On the days they are
present, only 50% are likely to be teaching at any given time. This is
distressing and a sad reflection of the state of affairs in the vast majority
of schools in our country. Private schools, by and large, provide better
quality education, but they are beyond the reach of the masses.

In my view,
government needs to get out of school education, handover the existing
infrastructure to responsible corporate houses, change laws that allow them to
make a small profit, and subsidise their costs so that they become efficient
and well-run institutions. The subsidy can be given directly to schools to allow
them to provide varying levels of tuition waivers to the children of lower
income families. Government can create a robust regulatory and supervisory
framework (on the lines of TRAI, IRDA, SEBI, RBI, etc.) for the education
sector.

I am sure these
measures will also help in improving the teaching methods and in elevating the
standard and motivation levels of our teachers.

Who are your role models in life?

It is hard to
pin-point one person and I feel blessed to have had a fairly well rounded support
from family, teachers, friends, and books in the process of growing up. I draw
inspiration from people who have conviction, passion, and clarity of thought; who
have ability to work hard and courage to challenge the status-quo; who do not
take themselves too seriously; and who spend some of their resources to achieve
the higher purpose of life and some of their time playing with children and
taking care of elders.

Which writers do you admire the most? If you had the chance
to re-live your life as someone else, who would you choose?

I stick mostly to non-fiction and while there are too many favorite books and authors to list, I love the simple and relatable humor in
books by Sam Levenson, the life skills taught by Dale Carnegie, and the seminal
work on English etymology by Norman Lewis, Wilfred Funk, and Henry Hitchings.
In the recent past, I have read and thoroughly enjoyed books on Mind, Passion,
and Happiness by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, Dr. Carol S. Dweck, David Rock, and Ken
Robinson.

If I were to relive my life, I would not be able to choose
anyone else. There are parts of others that I admire and get inspired by, but
as a whole, I enjoy being myself.

After 'English Bites!' what next? Will your next book focus
also focus on the English Language or are you planning to bring forth another
subject in an interesting manner?

I guess when you
write a book, you give it your all. My stock of ideas is now empty but it
doesn’t mean that I will not write another book. Book sales and readers’
feedback and appreciation are extremely strong motivators in rapidly refilling
one’s reservoir and giving new ideas and different perspectives to make more
meaningful and interesting books. However, I would like to stick to writing in
a similar genre (laugh as you learn). Feel strongly about and need to put in my
bit to make sure that that language does not become a handicap for anyone to
realize their ambitions and dreams!

What do you do when you are not writing?

Till recently, I
used to work as a Managing Director and Head of Sales for Treasury and Trade
Solutions division of a major multinational bank in India. I have now decided
to take a plunge in the field of education, training, consulting, and executive
coaching and will shortly start working with an organization that works for the
underprivileged children at the school level.

In my personal
life, I now live by the principle of learning one new skill every year (pity, I
understood and adopted this only a few years ago) and have dabbled in adventure
sports (like skiing, paragliding, bungee jumping) and getting off the beaten
track while travelling. I plan to hone my moderate skills in singing,
gardening, and cooking next. I also like to delve into human psychology and
waiting for the day when someone will actually pay me for my wise counsel.

If you had to change something in your book, what would that
be?

There are indeed
a few more things I can do with the book. I would add chapters on sports,
technology, fashion, and anything else the younger generation suggests. Since
these additions will made the book too voluminous, I would split the book into
two, each about 220-250 pages long. I would also like to add some more
interesting aspects of my life so that the reader gets a more balanced dose of
English language in a fun read.

Finally, what would be your message to all the readers?

The book is a
crazy mix of facts, fiction, and real-life. It is full of amusing incidents,
anecdotes, jokes, and a lot of interesting trivia. If any one of you believes
that English language is a handicap (big or small) in your career advancement,
your social acceptability, and affects your self confidence, you can take a
look at English Bites! If you are a language nut, you can take a bite too.
There is something in there for you too to chew, relish, and cherish.

The book is the
story of my life. It begins when I am in high school and much of the damage to
my understanding and grip over the English language has already been done. It
ends when, even after spending 20 years as a devoted student of the English
language, and having achieved my goals of getting into engineering, securing
one of the best jobs engineering has to offer, getting into a top-tier MBA
program, a medico wife, kids attending convent school, and a reasonably senior
position in a multinational bank, I am stumped by new discoveries every other
day. So much so that I find some unfamiliar English words in the nursery rhymes
of my kids. My extended student life as far as English language is concerned
continues and it’s an exciting journey. Come, join the fun.

Thanks a lot Manish for your time. All the best for your current
and future goals.